All fellow European users should sign the petition!
By the way, this is an official European Union initiative, it's safe and useful to add your vote (unlike those useless petitions on websites such as Change.org).
By the way, this is an official European Union initiative, it's safe and useful to add your vote (unlike those useless petitions on websites such as Change.org).
- It's often not practical: There is a vast spectrum of business models where "playable state" requires significant investment, or is even not technically feasible. It could require the company to give up additional intellectual property (server side). It could require them to relicense 3rd party brands (such as The Crew had license for car models), or assets (music). It could involve 3rd party software re-licensing.
- There's a precedent of existing software licensing models. The EU would need to tear up such models completely to enable this.
- You already agreed to the EULA/ToS when you signed up for the service. You were informed that the service could go down. Chose other games if you don't like this.
- Out of scope: The EU will look at business practices if they involve deception and exploitation, but other than that, markets are generally liberal. We don't just demand specific services from companies. At best, we can hope for clearer information to ensure that consumers are well informed of what they are paying for (perpetual license vs time-limited subscription to a live service.
This information disclosure is the real issue. Companies use the EULA/TOS to bury information that they know consumers are unlikely to read but also fulfill their legal obligations.
Often it’s difficult to even find this information until after you buy it, and they’re certainly not telling you on their Steam store page that they will completely kill the game at some point in the future.
Then again this applies for all things in life. Don’t worry if you don’t wanna do the thing. Someone else will.
- Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial: You're probably already running the Kubernetes config on the cluster anyway. Just release the server binaries/config/docs. Laws are also usually not retroactive, so negotiating licenses that allow for this in the future seems trivial too.
- You don't lose IP by distributing anything, just like you don't lose it for distributing the client. I don't own Ford because I bought a Ford car. The only thing licensed IP in a product does it that you can't sell it anymore after it expires. It has no effect on previously sold copies.
- EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses. They like to call it a service, but that doesn't mean that it actually is, legally. As opposed to SaaS, games are sold as a product with no expiration date. The EULA/ToS also always contain clauses like "terms can change at any time for any or no reason", which is inherently invalid. So the whole EULA/ToS could be invalid on its face too.
- This is just about basic ownership rights. If it's a rental/service (with a disclosed price for a specific time period), then it's fine. Otherwise it's a product and you have to abide by the regulation for products. Anything other than these two options is inherently unfair, because you can't assess the value of something if you don't know how long it may be used for.
I don't know any company that advertises "game will stay up for X amount of time and will always be playable". On the contrary I'm pretty sure every EULA specifies that they aren't. you're logging into someone else's server, so I should log in knowing that server won't say up forever
>EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses.
how is it unexpected 30 years into the internet that "oh yeah, this is a server-based game, it won't stay up forever". It's unfair, but laws are rarely made with a goal of perfect "fairness".
> Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial:
Nothing is trivial in tech. Not unless you're talking on the scale of years. This isn't even a gamedev thing, it's just that there's always random footguns and pitfalls due to the nature of shifting to a attrition strategy instead of a retention strategy.
> You don't lose IP by distributing anything
if you distribute IP you do not own, you end up taking damages while also having the game taken down. very few games are made fully in house anymore.
In any other industry this business technique is known as "theft".
What you can do, is to demand transparent, non-deceptive, and fair terms of service. What you can also do, it to speak with your wallet and refuse to play online-only games. It's not a human right to play games, you know.
I will also claim that you consented to that. Suddenly there is no theft!
(When I paid for the game, there were no ToS to sign either, so it's fair.)
Seems only fair to ensure the entire work eventually enters the public domain - otherwise what's the incentive for the rest of society to put up with copyright in the first place?
(E.g. we somehow have a lot of bodies regulating sport events, whereas playing football is just a silly hobby rather than something that actually matters. Same logic applies.)
Free-to-play games, or even purely subscription-based games, I kind of agree. But a thing I bought for 60-100 reserve currency shouldn't just poof! and disappear, especially if the company pulling the rug is doing well (hi, Ubisoft).
I guess it comes down to how long is long enough for that 60-100 currency. I'm sure greybeards who stuck with WOW for 20 years wouldn't feel swindled if the game shut down tomorrow. Devestated, but a huge chunk of lifetime entertainment is far from a rug pull. Meanwhile you can feel betrayed by stuff like Babylon's fall that didn't even make a year (even if very few were optimistic to begin with).
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to delete stuff out of my library because they don’t want to renew the contract for the music (f.ex). If they do that, they should be forced to refund the full original price of the purchase, at a minimum.
It’s also obscene for the creator of the work change the work retroactively. This should immediately surrender copyright protection on all materials covered by the first release, or the second release should not receive copyright protection (it's not a new work).
Not sure where the line is between a “remaster”/“director’s cut” but certainly by the time it’s in people’s libraries it’s over the line - I would be very upset to find out that, say, the ending of a movie changed to a version I specifically chose against purchasing (like a directors cut). If you want to release an extra ending, or a directors cut/remaster, fine, but don’t change the things people already bought.
This functionally will force them to sign perpetual licensing deals or not license the content at all. By setting the rules of the game, you can nudge them into the better behavior, and it becomes standard.
Like I'm sure they are used to abusing the consumer etc, because it's been legal to do so, and the way you stop that is attaching consequences for the behavior you want to stop. I'm sure that this will be a shift in how they negotiate contracts etc. And it will be a good one for the consumer.
Requiring separate licensing for playing my game in the cloud is also unconscionable and anti-consumer. Charging for managed-content-library services (like netflix/gamepass) is different but if I as a consumer buy a game and want to play it on a computer instance I rent from Amazon or Google, that should be legal.
In the sense that GDPR is forcing a shift in mindset for companies from "how we handle our data" to "how we handle the customer's data", there is a fundamental shift that needs to happen in the copyright mindset away from "licensing our content/protecting the copyright holders" to "protecting the customer's license". The idea of a license as an ephemeral thing that can be torn away from a consumer without consequence (because the lawyers put "haha eat shit" in some contract-of-adhesion) needs to stop. A significant number of license terms will need to be invalidated immediately etc, just like when other things are regulated (store regulations sometimes mean people can refund things today that they couldn't yesterday, etc). Mostly it will be fine / the consumer will be made whole from parties that are almost inevitably still around and actually able to pay (eg EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft haven't gone anywhere).
Virtually no petitions ever reach the thresholds. The effect of this system is to blunt the formation of actually-effective organized political groups, by burning their time and energy and feel like they're "participating" in EU lawmaking—and subsequently gaslight them into thinking they lack popular support, and should probably give up. When in fact many of the petitions are broadly popular among anyone who's polled; it's just that at its core it's an anti-democratic system set up to perpetuate laws in the opposite direction of what >50% of people actually want.
Few people are truly passionate about–in this example–video game consumer protection laws, but I'd wager an overwhelming majority of anyone who's asked would side with consumer protection over consumer abuse.
Someone needs to try, right? Once it fails, then we can be pessimistic.
I'm not claiming it would be safe in a cybersec way in the EU's servers, but at least they won't sell it.
I've always thought change.org was just a brilliantly constructed honeypot for rage.
Since ECIs were launched in 2012, 110 initiatives were started, 10 reached the needed vote count.
Of these 2 made actual impact:
- Ban Glyphosate led to a reevaluation of the pesticide approval procedure
- End The Cage Age made the commission reevaluate the factors for a transition int the agriculture sector.
This particular initiative about games will probably face much less head wind, since:
1. It is about customer rights ( which the EU just loves )
2. It will disproportionately impact American companies
[0] https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
There is a whole paragraph about the outcome in the page you literally linked. It leads to this report [1] where the commission basically dismisses the ECI and explains they will do nothing but at least the commission had to make its position clear and replies.
[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/document/download/09b68864-8425-4f...
” ensure that the scientific evaluation of pesticides for EU regulatory approval is based only on published studies, which are commissioned by competent public authorities instead of the pesticide industry”.
The second part was addressed by a proposal, that was accepted.
It’s in the bottom of the pages here:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
It doesn't matter one bit what a corporate spokesman says about democratic legislation and IMHO it feels unwholesome to even bring it up.
Because money talks, and CDPR has lots of Witcher/Cyberpunk money.
Yes, we are in 2024 an oligarchy of ceo's facading like a (republic) democracy. Wholesomeness was never in the equation. If you have any benevolent dictators, you may as well use them.
At a minimum it has the safe effect as any other hopeless change.org petition, media attention.
" The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) is a European Union (EU) mechanism aimed at increasing direct democracy by enabling "EU citizens to participate directly in the development of EU policies",[1] introduced with the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. This popular initiative enables one million citizens of the European Union,[2] with a minimum number of nationals from at least seven member states, to call directly on the European Commission to propose a legal act (notably a Directive or Regulation) in an area where the member states have conferred powers onto the EU level. This right to request the commission to initiate a legislative proposal puts citizens on the same footing as the European Parliament and the European Council "
I'm curious of your examples actually as I'd like to learn more about the Danish process specifically.
As for ECIs, the wikipedia page does show successes. Of course I have my doubts this will even reach the necessary 1 million signatures (and honestly needs more cause many will be invalidated), but if it does reach 1 million, it does have a shot of doing something!
Of 1843 petitions, 52 have been presented in the Folketing, and some of those are silly/unrealistic, like removing tax on fuel. Others had very widespread support and a lot of news coverage, like banning genital mutilation of children, but nothing came of that. I think the enthusiasm for this initiative has declined greatly, since only one petition got enough votes (50.000) in 2024 to reach the Folketing. People have realised it's pointless.
And at least the weather has picked up a bit right now haha! Time to get off the web and take advantage of it as Denmark gets so nice once the weather is good.